And then, without waiting for a response from us, she held the door open. A stream of candy stripers holding floral arrangements—each one bigger than the last—came pouring into my room, until every last available flat surface, including the floor, was covered with roses and daisies and sunflowers and orchids and carnations and flowers I could not identify, all overflowing from these vases and making the room smell sickly sweet.

And there weren’t just flowers, either. There were balloon bouquets, too, dozens of them—red balloons, blue ones, white ones, pink ones, heart-shaped and metallic ones with Thanks and Get Well Soon written on them. Then came the teddy bears, twenty at least, of all different sizes and shapes, with bows at their throats and signs in their paws, signs that said things like, Just Grin and Bear It and Thank You Beary Much!

Seriously. I watched them come in and pile this stuff up, and all I could think was, Wait. Wait. There’s been a mistake. I don’t know anyone who would send me a Thank You Beary Much bear. Really. Not even as a joke.

But they just kept coming, more and more of them. The nurses, you could tell, thought it was pretty funny. Even the Secret Service guys, standing in the doorway, seemed to be smirking behind the reflective lenses of their sunglasses.

Only my mom seemed as stunned as I was. She kept running to each new bouquet and tearing open the card and reading the writing on it out loud, in tones of wonder:

“Thank you for your daring act of bravery.

Sincerely, the US Attorney General.”

“We need more Americans like you.

The Mayor of the District of Columbia.”

“For an angel on earth, with many thanks,

the people of Cleveland, Ohio.”

“With much appreciation for your bravery underfire,

the Prime Minister of Canada.”

“You on are an example for us all. . .

the Dalai Lama.”

This was way upsetting. I mean, the Dalai Lama thinks I’m an example? Um, not very likely. Not considering all the beef I have consumed in my lifetime.

“There’s a lot more downstairs,” one of the candy stripers informed us.

My mom looked up from a card written by the Emperor of Japan. “Oh?”

“We’re still irradiating most of the cards, and running the fruit and candy through the X-ray machines,” the Secret Service guys informed us.

“X-ray machines?” my mom echoed. “Whatever for?”

One of the agents shrugged. “Razor blades. Tacks. Whatever. Just in case.”

“Can’t be too careful,” the other agreed. “Lot of whackos out there.”

My mom looked as if she didn’t feel too good after that. All her daisy freshness drained right out of her. “Oh,” she said faintly.

It was right after that that my dad showed up with Lucy and Rebecca and Theresa in tow. Theresa gave me a knock on the back of the head for the scare I’d given her the day before.

“Imagine how I felt,” she said, “when the policeman told me I could not get through to pick you up because there’d been a shooting. I thought you were dead!”

Rebecca was more philosophical about the whole thing. “Sam’s not a member of the group with the highest risk of death from gun violence—males ages fifteen to thirty-four—so I wasn’t particularly worried.”

Lucy, however, was the one with the most urgent need to see me . . . and alone.

“C’mere,” she said, and pulled me into the room’s private bathroom, where she immediately locked the door behind her.

“Bad news,” she said, speaking low but fast—the same way she spoke to her fellow squad members when she felt they hadn’t been showing enough spirit during the human pyramid. “I overheard the chief hospital administrator ask Dad when you were ready for your press conference.”

“Press conference?” I sat down hard on the toilet. I really thought for a second I was going to pass out. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Of course not,” Lucy said, matter of factly. “You’re a national hero. Everyone is expecting you to give a press conference. But don’t worry about it. Big sister Lucy has it all under control.”

With that, she slung her gym bag into the sink. Whatever was inside it—and I was pretty sure it was probably the entire contents of the medicine cabinet she and I shared—clanked ominously.

“First things first,” she said. “Let’s do something about that hair.”

It was only because I was in such a weakened physical state, what with my sleepless night and cast and all, that Lucy got the upper hand in that bathroom. I mean, I just didn’t have the strength to fight her. I did scream once, but I guess the Secret Service couldn’t hear me over the sound of the shower, since they didn’t come busting in, guns drawn, to save me this time.

But it would have taken a troop of commandos to stop Lucy. She had been waiting for this moment since the day I hit puberty, practically. Finally she had me in a position where I was powerless to stop her. She had brought with her not only a complete set of clothes for me, but a small arsenal of beauty products that she seemed intent upon squirting at me as I stood trapped in the shower stall, my broken arm, in its plaster cast, sticking out like a tree branch.

“This is awapuhi,” Lucy informed me, shooting something that smelled vaguely fruity at my head. “It’s a special Hawaiian ginger extract. Use it to wash your hair. And this is an apricot body scrub . . .”

“Lucy,” I yelled, as awapuhi got in my eyes, and I couldn’t, having only one free hand, get it out. “What are you trying to do to me?”

“Saving you,” Lucy explained. “You ought to be thanking me.”

“Thanking you? For what? Permanently blinding me with Hawaiian ginger extract?”

“No, for attempting to transform you into something resembling a human being. Do you have any idea how humiliating it is for me to have people calling me—all night, they were calling me—going, ‘Hey, isn’t that your sister? What happened to her? Is she in some kind of cult?’”

When I opened my mouth to protest this unfair statement, Lucy just squeezed Aquafresh into it. While I choked, she went on, “Here, use this conditioner, it’s the kind groomers use on their horses right before a show.”

“I—” Soap still in my eyes, I couldn’t see Lucy, but I swung at her with my cast anyway, “—am not a horse!”

“I realize that,” Lucy said. “But you genuinely need this, Sam. Consider it an intervention ... an emergency beauty intervention.” Lucy reached into the shower and shoved me back under the spray. “Rinse and repeat, please.”

By the time Lucy was done with me, I’d been scrubbed, plucked, exfoliated and blow-dried within an inch of my life.

But I had to admit, I looked pretty good. I mean, I’d been kind of offended by the intervention comment. But under Lucy’s careful supervision—and detachable defuser—my hair soon lost its copper-wire stiffness and instead of sticking straight up from the top of my head was curling loosely to my shoulders. And though she didn’t quite manage to make my freckles disappear, Lucy did do something that made them not stand out so much.

I didn’t mind the Hawaiian root extract, the apricot scrub or the horse conditioner. I could handle the mascara and the foundation and the lip gloss.

But I fully drew the line when Lucy whipped, from her gym bag, a bright blue blouse and matching skirt.

“No way,” I said, as adamantly as I could, for someone who was wearing nothing but a hospital towel, and not even a very big one. “I will wear your lipstick. I will wear your eyeliner. But I am not wearing your clothes.”

“Sam, you don’t have any choice.” Lucy was already holding the blouse up. “All of your clothes are black. You can’t appear in front of middle America dressed all in black. People are going to think you’re a Satan worshipper. You are going to dress like a normal person for once in your life, and you are going to like it.”

On the words like it, Lucy jumped me. I would just like to point out that she had an unfair advantage over me because:

she is two inches taller and about ten pounds heavier than I am, and

she was not impaired by having one arm in a cast, and

she did not have to worry about clutching a towel around her, and

she has many, many years of reading Glamour magazine’s Do’s and Don’t’s section behind her, lending her style convictions superhuman strength.

Really. That is the only reason I gave in. That and the fact that Lucy had not brought any of my own clothes for me to wear, and the ones I had worn the day before had been taken away by the Secret Service for testing, since there was apparently gun residue on them from Mr. Uptown Girl’s shooting spree.

When I finally emerged from that bathroom, I was wearing my sister’s clothes, my sister’s makeup, and my sister’s hair products. I basically looked nothing like my usual self. Nothing at all.

But that was OK. Really, it was. Because I didn’t really feel like my usual self, either, on account of the no sleep and the people with the signs down on the street and all the Thank You Beary Much bears, but also thanks to the awapuhi and all.

So when I came out of that bathroom, I was already pretty weirded out. In fact, I didn’t think things could get much weirder than they already were.

And that was when my mom, who was standing there looking kind of nervous amidst all of the flowers and the balloons, went, “Um, Samantha. There’s someone here to see you,” and I turned around and there was the President of the United States.

Even though I have lived in Washington, DC, all my life—except for that year our family spent in Morocco—I have hardly ever seen the President of the United States—and there have been three of them since I was born—in person.